A Child Of Atom

Some of my earliest childhood memories are linked, oddly enough, to the smell of freshly mixed concrete. My grandmother (paternal), who I called Big Mama, went through a phase of building onher house, adding concrete slab porches on both the front and back of the house, a concrete fish pond at one side, and she also built a sort of screened in, free standing building in her back yard. I'm not sure what you would call that building... it was screened on four sides, and reminds me now of the sort of thing that you see at national park recreation areas. I think later she ended up closing it all in, but I have a very strong memory of a party that was held in that space, with large quantities of hash being cooked. It seems to me that it was venison hash, though I can't be sure. When she poured the concrete for the porches she mixed it all herself, in wheelbarrows with water from a garden hose, and huge bags of concrete. The sound of the gravel and concrete being pushed back and forth in the wheelbarrow with a hoe is still with me as well. The fish pond was an elaborate affair that went up the side of the house and had waterfalls built into it and fake plants rooted in the cement, the type that you would normally put into an aquarium. All around the sides of the raised pond she imbedded marbles, many of which I was guilty of picking out and stealing over the following years. Of course she allowed me to leave handprints in the back porch, and there were foot prints on the front porch, there because I ran across it while it was still wet, and she didn't bother to smooth them away again. Though the house is no longer there, and I'm sure that the porches were torn up when new construction was done, there were a number of years of my life where that permanent record of my younger self stood frozen in time. It was a nice feeling, like immortality.

Anyway... there is a fresh sidewalk being poured a few blocks from the office, and I purposely chose to eat outside near that spot today, even though it was a bit chilly, just so that I could smell my memories for a while.